Category Archives: Materials in CAD/PLM

What does it mean to define a material as we move along the product lifecycle, from concept, through to engineering design, simulation, prototyping, manufacture, and distribution to the customer? A ‘material’ means one thing to a material engineer, something else to a CAD designer, and another to someone in manufacturing. Companies can spend weeks of wasted effort ensuring consistency or attempting to find or verify data.

The management of materials information is just one piece of the ‘materials intelligence’ puzzle. Discover how to reduce design cycles, minimize risk, improve product quality, aid compliance, and much more, by taking these five steps to increasing your Materials IQ.

The rate of adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) is incredible. AM brings a physicality to ideas, and offers ways for people to touch upon solutions that would have been impossible to otherwise imagine. Equally impressive is the scale of investment in machines for producing AM parts, which is of course supported by business cases highlighting reduced development times, fewer prototype costs, reduced part counts, and flexible manufacturing. But, I am seeing more and more evidence that the prescribed route to this ‘Nirvana’ is via a process of trial and error for settings, powders, and even machine capability.

As any simulation analyst can tell you, quality materials and property data is essential for modeling and simulation within product design. However, this information often exists in many different formats and locations throughout an organization. For authors of data, generating the right materials information for simulation (usually by analyzing populations of materials test data) can be time consuming, the process can be inefficient, and it’s certainly always complex. Moreover, the final data that’s produced out of this process is not always then traceable to its source.

Manufacturing organizations are increasingly recognizing that the critical IP they have developed in relation to the engineering materials that they use needs to be managed in a comprehensive and cohesive way. In our latest blog post over at #LiveWorx, we look how to more effectively digitalize and then apply this evolving materials information, in order to save time and cost, drive innovation, and reduce risk.

The REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) Authorization List has been updated to include 12 new substances, bringing the total to 43 substances. REACH is a European Union regulation that addresses the production and use of chemical substances to provide a high level of protection for human health and the environment.

PLM Integrated Material Intelligence: Can We Get the Best of Both Worlds?It’s an interesting question, posed in a recent blog post by Siemens PLM Software.

The post begins by highlighting a very important point: consistency should rule where materials data management is concerned. It goes on to highlight that there’s too much scope for error if an engineer in one part of a company works off a different material definition from a designer somewhere else. But, at the same time, companies need depth. They’re looking to squeeze every drop from the rich materials data available to them.

Our very own Stephen Warde has been interviewed for the blog of one of the major providers of CAD/PLM software. Speaking to PTC, Steve highlights the difficulties faced by design engineers and the impact materials have on the ultimate cost and performance of a product.

Simulation engineers are often desperate for sophisticated material properties to support their temperature dependent and/or non-linear material models, enabling more accurate simulation and validation of product performance.

If you are in the ‘material authority’ role in your company, either as a materials specialist or a member of the simulation team who has acquired this responsibility, you will need to respond! I’ve worked with many people in this role who are dedicating a lot of time to queries from design and simulation engineers about how materials will perform under various conditions, or which is the best material to use in certain operating conditions and environments.

I recently presented at a web seminar hosted by Granta’s partners at Dassault Systèmes, and it raised an interesting question about the materials property data needed by simulation analysts. We were looking, in particular, at the Abaqus/CAE® software. Its users want accurate material properties for use in their CAE software. But they also want confidence in that data – to know that it comes from a reliable source. And their companies want control: i.e., to ensure that all of their analysts are using data that is consistent, up-to-date, and traceable should simulation results ever need to be reviewed or updated. How can we meet these various requirements without disrupting well-established workflows and processes?